There Are Little Kingdoms (4 page)

‘Very good!’ said the old fella, as if this was the best decision a man could ever hope to make.

There were certain pieces of information available. He knew, for example, that the course of Irish history was besmirched with treacheries and suppressions. He knew this because in some foggy classroom at the back of his mind he had been made to read it aloud to the rest of the children, despite or maybe even because of his terrible stammer. T-t-t-the course of I-I-Irish history is b-b-b-besmirched… You wouldn’t likely forget the treacheries and suppressions after that.

The old boy looked over again, with rheumy eyes and gummy mouth, and he winked:

‘Listen, there’s every chance now we’ll get in before five. You’ll be able to get down to Rooney’s, get a hold of them keys.’

‘Do you reckon?’ he said, and there was more than a sliver of fear in him.

‘Ah we’ll be in before five easy.’

A childish notion came. He thought that maybe he had died, and was in limbo, and that this old boy was some manner of gatekeeper. He shucked himself free of this sensation as best as he could, looked out the window: gloom floated down from morbid hills. The Expressway passed through a village, really more of a crossroads than a village, just a collision of a few byways and houses, a shop and, finally, a pub. As the bus passed by this establishment, the eyes nearly came out of his head. Was this, he wondered, a clue as to the character of the individual? He swivelled in his seat and looked desperately back down the road as the pub went out of view again. The throat was after going pure dry. He straightened himself and cast a wary glance across the aisle.

‘He’s making good time today,’ said the old fella.

‘He is.’

A bigger town announced itself with garden centres and D-I-Y warehouses and a large sign in the middle of a new roundabout that read:

BULMER’S CIDER WELCOMES YOU TO CLONMEL

‘He’s sucking diesel today,’ said the old fella. ‘Twenty to five!’

‘Faith, he is,’ he said.

Taking the Reebok holdall, he stood as the bus eased into the bleak station and he made a whistling attempt at nonchalance.

‘Listen to me,’ said the old fella, ‘the best of luck to you now with everything. Something tells me you might have done a good deal here. And don’t mind what the crowd below are saying.’

‘Thanks very much,’ he said, and he stepped off the Expressway and into the mysteries of Clonmel.

He wasn’t long getting directions to Rooney’s—Davitt Street, first left—and he wasn’t long noticing that it was beside a small pub name of The Dew Drop Inn. He had a few minutes to spare, and there was a strange draw from this place, a magnet drag. The next thing he knew, he was inside at the counter, in the dank half-light, throwing the holdall down to his feet and putting his elbows up on the bar.

‘What’ll it be?’ said the young one behind the bar.

‘Pint b-bottle of B-Bulmer’s,’ he said, ‘and a b-b-baby Powers.’

It appeared that he knew full well what he was doing in this type of situation. There was a bottle put down in front of him, and a pint glass filled with ice, and the small whiskey appeared as a cheerful companion. He made short work of this order, and he started to feel somewhat philosophical. What, after all, he said to himself, is an identity? Surely it is only a means of marking yourself out in time. And what is time in itself, only an arbitrary and entirely illusory system designed to remind us of death? To separate us from the eternal present enjoyed by the beasts of the fields. So why need you bother with either one, when you have the bones of six hundred euro in your fist, and a fag lit in the corner of your mouth? The five o’clock news came on the radio. It said Orla was missing since March 14th and the one clue for investigators was a red baseball cap.

‘That’ll be me,’ he said to the young one, and she responded with a lazy smile and a stretching movement like a cat would make. There might be sport to be had in this place yet.

He strode in the door of Rooney’s like a man who owned the rights to the whole of love. There was another young lady there, neat behind her desk, with a poignant mouth and agreeable knees.

‘Good afternoon,’ he said. ‘I had an appointment for five?’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘It must be Mr Tobin, is it?’

‘Correct.’

‘Mr Tobin,’ she explained, ‘Mr Rooney is actually out at present. He is showing a pig operation in the direction of Knockbawn, but listen now, I have the keys and the lease here for you.’

‘Outstanding.’

‘The money has cleared. Everything is ready to go. All you have to do is sign your name. So if you’d like to take a seat, you can have a quick read through and make sure everything is in order.’

‘I will,’ he said. ‘I’ll take the w-weight off my feet.’

He felt that he was doing very well. His manner was charming, and if he didn’t look exactly dapper, than at least he had a benevolent aura. Unfortunately, he noted, there was a smell of drink off him, which was something he would have to watch, but still and all he was presented with the necessary document. The lease shook a little as he read through it. It turned out he was after buying a chipper in Clonmel.

With the keys swinging, he set off into a most pleasant evening: the town swooned with glow, like a back-lit ale. He searched out No. 15a McDermott Street, which turned out to be no more than a hundred yards around the corner from Rooney’s. After some trial and error with the keys, he managed to get the shutters up and the door opened and he crossed the threshold into a new era for both himself—Mr R.K. Tobin, apparently—and for the Uptown Grill.

So what do you do? What do you do when you wake up on a bus in South Tipp, and you don’t know who you are, or where you’re going, and the next thing you’re inside in an auctioneers being presented with keys and then you’re stood in the Uptown Grill, which is fourteen foot long by ten wide and contains a large deep fat fryer, a griddle, a glass-doored fridge, a full stock of supplies, a counter and a cash register? What do you do?

You start peeling spuds.

It quickly became clear that R.K. Tobin was not without some experience in the catering trade. The operation of the Uptown Grill didn’t seem to faze him in the slightest. He wasn’t in the door a half hour and he had wire baskets of nicely cut chips waiting for the fryer, he had the burgers battered, he had the haddock in breadcrumbs, and the potato cakes rolled, he had a griddle full of onions frying up nice and slow, releasing their sweetness to the air. Everything was waiting for the off, and as he worked he whistled a selection of show tunes from the early 1950s: ‘If I Knew You Were Coming I’d A Baked A Cake’, ‘Cherry Pink And Apple Blossom White’, ‘Moon River’. His domestic arrangements, as it turned out, were all to hand, for he had climbed a greasy stairway out back and found a room above the chipper, same size, with a sink, a couch, a half bottle of Cork gin and a selection of golf magazines. He felt utterly alive with entrepreneurial swagger, and who was to say he wouldn’t be taking up the golf himself? He brought the gin down with him as he prepared to open up for the teatime crowd. It just seemed like the thing to do.

Business came in fits and starts but overall it didn’t seem a bad trade. It was steady enough through to seven o’clock, then you had lads late from work coming in for feeds, then a good crew around half-nine or ten in severe need of soakage. Quiet moments, he took a hit of gin from under the counter, looked out the door, saw the town fall away down the slate rooftops of terraces, turn into farmland and fields, melancholy hills. The light was pleasing—a softness to it—and there was an amount of birds, though he did not know the names of birds.

How much did he know? You could say he had the broad strokes of things. He was only too well aware that he was an Irishman. He had a fair idea about the kind of lads who were coming in for burgers and chips: ordinary fellas, big eaters, red in the face from wind, hands like the buckets off JCBs, you’d imagine pulmonary disorders, midnight visitations. They were polite enough, made a certain amount of small talk. Nobody questioned or made direct comment on the fact of a new proprietor at the Uptown, but they were not unwelcoming of the stranger. One chap left a newspaper on the counter, which let him know he had a Tuesday on his hands. Somehow, this came as no great surprise. He had a quick look through the paper: odd, as if he knew things and at the same time, did not know. The way that a cow looks at you in the moonlight. A cow will incline its head to one side, and it’ll stare at you with big wet eyes, as if it is sure it has seen you somewhere before but can’t quite place you. This is the way he was reading the paper. Captains of industry, streels of girls at dinner dances, young lads hurling, planning applications, weddings, births, deaths. All of it was strange but familiar.

According to a notice on the door, the Uptown closed early on week nights, at eleven bells, and stayed late the weekends. He wasn’t going to argue with that and at eleven o’clock, he closed up and took to the quiet streets for a breath of fresh air. There was a spit of misty rain falling, which was nice after the heat of the fryer, and even at eleven o’clock there were still some flecks of daylight in the far western sky. It was May, alright, he’d been bang on the money there. He stood smoking outside a department store, cool as a breeze but when he looked in at the window display, he was hit by another tremor, and this one nearly laid him out. It was the mannequin of a lady that did it, she was got up in the latest gear, some kind of suede outfit, and the way the mannequin’s face was set was kind of… off, kind of twisted. It was set in a kind of drunken leer. The brown, wavy hair falling to the shoulders just so, the green belligerent eyes, the suede jacket, the leer—he had seen this look before. It was the mother.

They are walking down College Road. It’s the night-time. She is still a young woman, with a child on either side of her. He would be the younger by a year or two, he might be seven years old. He has her by one hand and the other child, it has to be Denis, he has her by the other. She can barely get along the street, she lurches, drags them towards the railings. It’s late, on a summer’s night, and he has a bag of groceries in his hand. They mustn’t have had the tea yet. The woman can’t walk, she’s crying, then she’s laughing. She has a large brown bag with chips wedged under her arm, the vinegar is oiling the paper, and she almost drops it on the pavement as she misses her step.

‘Mam,’ he says, ‘would you m-mind the chips, would yuh?’

The tremor passed on its way—down over the terraces of the town it went, away into the melancholy hills—and he bolted for the first pub he could find. By luck, it was quite a pleasant lounge bar and a hand-written notice on the door shakily announced that a pass-the-mike session was in progress. Pint bottle of Bulmers, b-b-b-baby Powers, times two, times three, and suddenly it was past midnight, and he was in flying form. There was a chap had a Casio keyboard and he was playing accompaniment to anybody who’d sing. A mike was passed around the dim-lit lounge, left and right, left and right, now who has the bar of a song for us? A woman called Mairead got up and smoothed down her good blouse and did an outstanding version of ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’. The landlord, a man called Johnny—big sentimental face on him—came out over the bar and launched into ‘The Day Billie Joe McAllister Jumped Off The Tallahatchie Bridge’.

‘You’ll learn a new one yet, Johnny!’ somebody shouted, and everybody laughed.

Pint b-bottle, please. Someone called Bob sang ‘The Black Hills Of Dakota’, and wasn’t asked to do another. After a while it got maudlin. A lad called Michael Russell was asked to sing, and he sang ‘The Summer Wind’, because that was some man called Coughlan’s song and half of the place couldn’t handle this at all, the man of the Coughlans was only a month in the ground.

‘Fifty-two years of age!’ cried Mairead.

Left and right, left and right, pass the mike.

‘What about this gentleman here? What’s your own name, sir?’

‘Am… R-R-Richard,’ he said.

‘Will you sing one for us, Rich?’

‘Ah stop!’

‘Ah come on now, Richie!’

Where it came from, he did not know but he took that mike and he stood up square and he closed his eyes. He wasn’t sweet—you couldn’t say that—or melodic, no, but he was as big-voiced as they come, pure loud, a most powerful set of lungs. He sang ‘Eternal Flame’ by The Bangles.

‘… cloh-ose yur eyes… gimme yur hand… darlin’… do you feel mah heart beat-iin’… do you unnerstan’… do you feel the PAAIIINN… am I own-lee dreeeamin’… or is this BURNIN’… an ee-ternal FLAME…’

There were people up off their stools howling for more. He pulled out a big one and let it rip—‘Crying’ by Roy Orbison. He made a fair reach for the high notes even. From the corner of his good eye, he threw a shine in the direction of the lady Mairead. There didn’t seem to be a husband in tow.

‘It’s hard to unnn-erstan’… how the touuuuccch of yur haaan’… can star’ me cryin’… cry-aye-ah-han… an’ now ahm ohhh-furrrr yuh-hooooooo…’

There was no doubt about it but he had a big future ahead of him at the pass-the-mike session in Keogh’s Lounge Bar on Clancy Street of a Tuesday night. They asked him to do a third one, but he said no, no, firmly. You got to know when to hold ’em, and know when to fold ’em.

And yes, one good eye. He was only walking away from Keogh’s when it struck him that he was half-blind. Leftie was firing blanks. He had a look up at the moon to be sure and he realised that the peripheries were indeed mightily skewed. So. The clues were starting to come in. He was an R.K. Tobin, call him Richie. He had the lease of a chipper in Clonmel. He’d had a mother a demon drunk, and a brother by the name of Denis. He was half blind, and something told him there had been an accident, and he had got money from it, which was now down to less than six hundred euro. He knew his way around the inside of a deep-fat fryer and home, for now, was a small unkempt room with a couch and a sink.

When he got there, he unscrewed the bottle of Cork gin and got good and familiar with it. He had the broad strokes of things and he knew that he had been drunk many thousands of times, mostly on account of the heebie jeebies. It was through no fault of his own but he was simply not the sort of man who was comfortable in the night-time. He was familiar with the motions of alcohol. The elevations of mood were no news to him, nor the sudden dips. He knew what it was like to drink big in small towns—it was hard work sometimes, you had to have the same good time over and over again.